TAY, Day 7: Do the work!

Today I did yoga in the (late) morning and – surprise – I genuinely enjoyed it.

In the end our practice asks of us one thing only – show up and do the work (technically, it’s two things but even if we show up at the desk and just look outside the window, this too might be part of the work).

I’ve started working on a series of shorter type animations with the theme “Do the work”.

The idea is to encourage creatives show up and do the work even when – especially when – we are scared or lazy.

This is the summary of the process and what it lead to.

Do the work!

To match the image of the artist working on a painting, I wanted to use a “hand-written” type that would convey a painterly feel and animate as if being filled by paint.

The typeface that at first sight gave an impression to be written or painted by hand, was still too smooth, even and perfect for this.

“How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.”

– Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art”

I love hand-written type. It tells you something about the person who wrote the text, their personality and even their state of mind (angry, relaxed, stressed, enamoured…).

All this is lost in computer generated “hand-written” fonts. This is why customising “hand-written” fonts and giving them a human dimension is worth an extra effort (when the schedule permits).

I started by destroying the perfect vector curves using the Pen tool. Then I added more destruction by applying to the letters a few effects to make them look even more rugged.

Even the strokes that revealed the type (I used three strokes over every letter, represented by three colours) got the “uneven” treatment to make the reveal more interesting (following Andrzej Pach’s recipe). Here is the result.

Things to change/improve

There are a number of things I would like to improve in this project. I am not able to implement them all just yet but am sure the gap will be narrowing down as I go.

For the burst out effect of animated blobs of paint Andrzej uses one of Ae’s native effects. It adds an element of surprise to the animation. I’d like to take a step further and maybe animate more blobs coming to the sides as well as make the current burst more convincing. (I am thinking of “Particular”).